


Guns Are Worth Bonding Over

by 3VAD127 (orphan_account)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Gen, Trolls on Earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:11:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1524038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/3VAD127
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade and Eridan bond rather unexpectedly over guns and shooting things illegally in the woods behind her apartment. They don't actually manage to kill anything, but the guns alone are worth it. Done for the HS Rarepair Swap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guns Are Worth Bonding Over

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fergalicious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fergalicious/gifts).



The Game hadn’t been kind to any of them, and it apparently didn’t matter that they’d “won.” When the eight kids and twenty-four trolls had been relocated to a planet that seemed a whole lot like Earth, they thought nothing much had changed—trolls and humans now lived on the same planet, but nothing the kids had done in The Game seemed to have much consequence. None of their grist transferred into money, their Godtier powers were redacted, and they still had to insert themselves into a society they weren’t familiar with.

Except this time, they were adults.

Jade Harley had quickly impressed several Fortune 500 R&D companies with her skills but was having a hard time getting in anywhere due to her “incredibly young age and nonexistent social skills.” Well, fuck them, she had said.

She’d figure out her own way.

While her friends were very close online, they quite frankly irritated her a little in real life, especially considering she grew up on an isolated island after her grandfather had died. She just needed to do her own thing, and she hadn’t heard from anyone—human or troll—in a few weeks at least.

She liked to hunt her own meat (however illegal it might have been), and her small rooftop garden offered her some herbs and vegetables, but she still had to (begrudgingly) go to the supermarket every once in a while and get the things she couldn’t grow or kill herself.

Jade was standing in line behind a quite ridiculously tall cerulean, flipping her hair out of her eyes and cursing the fact that she had forgotten a hair tie, when a familiar set of horns caught her attention. They were jagged and quite sharp at the ends, though they seemed a bit chipped and dull since she’d last seen them.

Quickly she hopped lines, dumping the entire contents of her basket on the conveyor belt. “Hi! Uh—” she glanced at his nametag, “—Eridan, right?”

He had the decency to look surprised for all of two seconds before scowling. The expression looked much more familiar on him. “Fuckin’—I mean, hi. Find everything alright?”

The line was so painfully rehearsed she couldn’t help laughing. “Fine! I see you’re just as much of a grumpy ass as always. Aren’t you gonna hit on me again like when we first met?”

The troll’s face suddenly closed off, expression stony and unreadable, and mechanically he scanned her items and placed them in plastic bags. “No I’m not, and I am… sorry about that. I was young an’ stupid.” He fiddled with the register. “Here’s your change.”

Jade straightened. “What the fuck, man? Can’t you tell when someone’s telling a joke? You need to lighten up. Hey, you still shoot that god-forsaken gun you were always talking about? I’ve been bored out of my skull for the past couple of days, and it wouldn’t be that big of a deal at all if you wanted to bring it along and kill some shit.”

Eridan blinked, but his expression never changed. “…Seriously?”

“Fuck yeah. I’m not THAT much of an asshole to lead you on.”

The corner of his lips quirked. “Fine. I get off work in an hour, but I better not fuckin’ regret this, Harley.”

\---

“Are you sure this is exactly legal? I thought you needed a license or somethin’ to hunt around here—”

Jade hushed him. “You’re absolutely no fun and you’re scaring away th—FUCK,” A small hare suddenly erupted from the underbrush about fifty yards away, and Jade barely had time to level her rifle and shoot. The sound reverberated through the trees, and she cursed when she could still hear the hare scampering away.

Eridan was already headed in that direction. “Do you think you got it?”

Jade followed him. “Probably not, but you seriously need to shut the hell up next time. I think I missed it.”

He had at least known that dressing in his usual gaudily-colored clothes would’ve been a bad idea, instead wearing some simple blacks and greens. Strapped to his back was his over-sized rifle, though he had yet to use it. He kicked the leaves around the base of a tree. “Yeah, it’s not here. Was just a hopbeast though, so I don’t see the big deal. We can just try again.”

Jade nodded. “Not like we had even gotten to my spot anyway. Besides, we’re looking for way bigger stuff than just a little bunny.”

Eridan perked, his earfins fluttering against his skull. She could tell he was definitely excited because his gait was bouncy and energetic the entire way to her spot, which was much deeper in the woods than before. She scaled the tree easily, settling herself onto three old boards serving as her deer stand. The troll lay next to her as they waited.

And waited.

And three hours later, they were still waiting. Jade groaned, burying her forehead in her hand. She was used to this sort of thing, but with Eridan next to her, she was more jittery and eager than usual. “The wind’s been shitty today anyway,” she grumbled in lieu of a proper explanation.

Eridan pushed his glasses up his face, pulling himself to a kneeling position. He tugged the Crosshairs into his lap and started examining it, muscles in his jaw tensing nearly imperceptibly.

Jade looked on with interest. “Wassat?”

He straightened in pride. “This is Ahab’s Crosshairs, one a the finest god-weapons on Alternia, utilized by the great First Orphaner, Dualscar, durin’ the time before the Vast Glub what killed all a the—”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, a little exasperated, “but how does it work?”

He paused. “You… want me to use it here?”

“Nothing’s coming anyway.”

He hesitated, considering for a moment but coming to a consensus quickly. Very fluidly he leveled the gun into the distance and fired, a great beam of bright blue energy exploding from the tip. The closest trees and shrubs were nearly vaporized, and the line of his shot stretched on beyond where Jade could see.

She whistled.

“An’ that’s its lowest setting,” he said proudly, earfins flushing a flashy violet purple.

“I need to try that thing,” Jade said as she grabbed it from his hands, leveling it before he could protest and pulling the trigger.

She braced for an incredible kick back, but nothing happened. Growling, she pulled the trigger again, and again, but still nothing came out.

Eridan sighed. “God damn it, Harley, calm down…”

“I don’t understand. It worked pretty well for you.”

“Well, yeah, but listen. I found this thing in a chest, along with Mindfang’s eight-sided dice. It was pretty famous and well-known back on Alternia, and for a planet where your worth was based entirely on how well you could fight, a lotta trolls wanted it. Do you really think it coulda lasted thousands a sweeps without at least a few assholes tryin’ to find it and use it themselves?”

She looked away, considering. “So… why didn’t they?”

He smiled very slightly. “They found it at least. But Dualscar was clever an’ put a failsafe on it so it wouldn’t fall into some dirtbag’s unworthy hands.”

Jade snorted, green eyes sparkling with mirth. “You’re serious right now? That’s straight out of a fuckin’ pirate movie like serio—”

“—if you say that it’s lame I swear to God I will find a way to legally end you an’ bury you where no one will find the body—!”

She laughed, loudly and in a way she hadn’t in a long time. “Fuckin’ A, dickface, calm down, just show me how to do it.”

His cheeks were still purple, but her laughter seemed to have imbalanced him. Eridan sighed. “Alright. One good thing I can say about you is that you was holdin’ it right, so great job or whatever. Now, she’s pretty finicky and don’t put out for just any old person, so uncurl your last two fingers—I know it’s fuckin’ weird, just do it—and put them under the, the… no, you’re not doin’ it right, hold on.”

He slid up behind her, straightening her posture just a little. His fingers curled over hers under the trigger, nudging them into place, and she was distracted for a minute because he wasn’t warm at all. It kind of felt like he was pulling her heat away, and she was reminded in a moment that he wasn’t exactly human.

“—So you got it?” His voice was gravelly and lower than she expected, like it was generated deep in his thoracic cavity for the sole purpose of articulating so many consonants together.

She nodded, dark hair brushing her shoulder, and if her cheeks were burning, well—nobody was around to see anyway. They pulled the trigger together, and Jade felt a thrill from her skull to her toes when a thick beam of white-hot energy blasted from the tip of the gun.

“Fuckin’ awesome, the raddest shit I’ve ever seen!” She bounced on her knees, gushing excitedly about the mechanics and the hold of the gun and oh my God Eridan the kickback was INCREDIBLE did you know it did that?

Eridan watched her carefully, smiling enough to show his teeth for the first time since she’d first seen him, and every bit of his happiness was contagious. Jade laughed, high on the feeling of the rifle heavy in her hands, and for the first time she wondered why nobody had ever bothered to tell her about him.

She took him by the back of the neck and bumped their foreheads together. “I’ve decided.”

His fins had flared when she grabbed him, but he looked much less tense when he figured out what she was trying to do. “Decided what?”

“That you’re not so bad. Also we’re gonna go back to my place since the sun is setting already, and you’re going to take that thing apart and show me exactly how it works.”

Eridan huffed. “The technology is way too advanced for your primitive alien race to ever understand.” He leaned toward Jade, going so far as to brush against her knee. “But I dunno, you’re pretty advanced. I think you can handle it.”

She grinned. “Then thank you. You really are too generous.” The feeling of excitement must have been overtaking her because she quickly pressed her lips against his cold cheek and jumped out of the tree, laughing and running away.

“I’ll see you at my house!”

Jade barely heard his shout and the reply of “Hey, you stole my fuckin’ rifle!” before she was out of earshot, but she knew that when she got home, he'd be right behind her. 

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for the lateness of this piece, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. Jade was a real treat to write.


End file.
